PowerPoint is great for creating on-the-fly presentations. But what if you want a more impressive sales pitch that doesn’t use those crummy fonts, stale backgrounds and overused clipart? If you have access to professional design software (or want to hire a graphic designer), here are three reasons you should consider using Adobe InDesign instead.
Branding consistency
Your presentation deck should be a visual extension of your marketing materials. (And we certainly hope those generic built-in PowerPoint templates don’t look like the rest of your brand!) Sure, you can create a custom PowerPoint theme, but to have maximum control over fonts, colors and other design elements, you should stick to using the professional design software that was used to create your other marketing materials in the first place.
Design control
When’s the last time you tried to design with something fancier than a solid rule in PowerPoint? It ain’t a pretty process. InDesign was built for page layout, so it gives you the consistency of PowerPoint (auto slide numbers on the master page, paragraph styles, etc.) along with the creativity of professional design software. That means you can easily add infographics, icons and other powerful design elements to your presentation with ease.
Compatibility
Remember how beautiful your PowerPoint presentation looked on your office computer? And how it looked nothing like that when you went to present on another computer? Editable documents, like Microsoft PowerPoint or Word, can load with slightly different fonts and spacing when opened on different machines. To prevent this, make sure you export your presentation as a PDF, no matter what software you’re using. That’s easy to do from InDesign: just go to File > Export and choose the options you want.